by H. L. Murphy
“Fuck it, fortune favors the bold,” I mumbled while widening the opening enough to pass through.
“Bullshit, fortune favors the asshole that remembers to bring tanks,” James countered. Since I was going through first, James felt it acceptable to speak his diatribe at a volume more appropriate to a heavy metal concert. Maybe it was just my imagination, maybe it was just me being a little nervous, but I felt certain his words had reached and been understood by Zombie Green. As that unstoppable titan qualified as his own goddamn tank, I was sure he agreed with the voluminous asshole masquerading as my best friend.
Being entirely too focused on a pair of prolapsed assholes, I utterly failed to notice the drywall cracking and collapsing beneath me until I was rushing to meet the ground face first. As I lay upon the floor, considering how many different ways my fall could have gone better, it dawned on me that I might want to draw my pistol in case something in here thought I was a delicacy. The horror movie atmosphere was considerably worse from floor level. Not only did it seem like I was seconds away from the unholy creature from the seventh level of hell pulling my spleen out through my navel, but now I was crumpled upon the floor which could easily be mistaken for cowering. Not to be picky, but I was pretty goddamn sure that whatever nightmarish demonic entity summoned by the idiot teenagers performing profane rituals in the swamp can't differentiate between crumpled and cowering, and even if they could the bastards wouldn't care. You're their prey whether you're cowering or just crumpled. It isn’t as though they're going to stop long enough to consider the scene as they discover it. The Archduke of Hell, come forth to devour the pure of heart and decorate the walls with everybody else isn't going to give you a pass because your dumbass fell through the goddamn wall and you need a minute to compose yourself before facing the whole soul devouring and imminent cock sockery.
Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought. Is it possible the cumulative damage is finally showing itself? Aw, come on. I don't want to wander around babbling to myself constantly because of a few little taps on my noggin.
Zombie Green used a steel bumper like a Louisville slugger on your skull, and mother fucker he has aiming for the stands.
Point taken. Hey, I just realized how hungry I am. Think maybe if I eat something I'll stop talking to myself?
No, I don't, but you should eat something.
Pistol out and pointed into a darkness filled with who knew what terrors, I removed a protein bar from my nowhere near snazzy tactical vest. I didn't just stuff the bar in my mouth, but it wasn't much more dignified. Yeah, the idiot that fell through a wall and was sweating bullets over being eaten or violated my some hell spawned thing is concerned about his dignity. Go figure.
Protein bar consumed I felt much better, and even got back to my feet without making an ass of myself. As I stood back up, it occurred to me I might want to make use of my NVGs, rather than stumbled around the room bumping into cock sock wearing demonic entities. Taking a moment I produced three glow sticks from my nowhere near snazzy tactical vest, cracking each one in turn I shook it up and threw each one into a distant corner of the shop. Yes, the glow sticks were bright enough I had to adjust my NVG settings to see anything but white out, but given my choices I did it anyway.
Despite my insane fears, there wasn't a ten foot tall demonic presence sizing me up as fast food. Nor were there any zombies. The entire range seemed to have been closed for business when the city was overrun. Good news for me, terrible news for the owners. With my fears somewhat allayed, I set to finding a rifle. Rumor had long held the owner fought in Vietnam as air cavalry, and hated communist produced weapons with an undying passion. Judging by his inventory, I'd have to say the rumors had it right. Thirty rifles for sale and not one goddamn Kalashnikov pattern to be seen. Of all the times to be blindly patriotic. The market for Kalashnikov pattern rifles had really been heating up, with made in the USA parts finally being produced in quantity and quality enough to make operating the venerable design in the twenty-first century not only viable, but often preferable. I stood before the rack of AR-15s and pump action shotguns considering my options. I could just chuck it in the fuck it bucket and take an AR-15, magazines, and the fuck ton of rounds in the storage room. The storage room. An idea flickered to life in the depths of my brain and I turned to observe the door marked private. It was where the employees stored ammunition and several boxes of firearms. Firearms they didn't have space for on the rack, including, possibly, a certain combloc rifle loathed by the owner despite the numerous requests by faithful customers to purchase one. One look at the door told me I wasn't just waltzing through, so I pulled a twelve gauge pimp off the rack. Behind the counter lay two types of shotgun rounds, buck and slug. For this job I chose slugs. Two ounces of solid lead would knock down any wild game in North America. That door was straight fucked.
“Finn, what are you doing?” James asked just before I fired a two ounce slug into the door next to the knob. A gaping hole the size of the battleship Bismark appeared in the reinforced door, but the door remained locked so I put another slug through the door above and to the right of the first hole. My ears rang from the shotgun blasts, but the door swung open with minimal effort. Within the storage room was, unsurprisingly, more of what lay on the racks and shelves with the beautiful exception of the Yugo M70 kalashnikov pattern under folding rifle. It wasn't as short as my SBR had been, but a quick check assured me the rifle would work just fine as is. Since the rifle had no attachment ring for a single point sling I looked around for a standard rifle sling. After I found something that would work well enough, I passed box after box of ammunition to James. The range owner may not have cared for the AK-47, but he made up for it with his overwhelming allegiance to the AR-15. Dozens of cases of ammunition lay within the storage room, and I was determined we would take every single box. James finally told me to stop and get my ass out of there, because he felt we'd been stationary too long. He was right. Between Zombie Green and the would be dictators of Krueger Creek, we needed to be moving away from the both of them. On my way out, I ripped open a package of fingerless gloves, similar to weight lifting gloves, but with knuckle molded Kevlar plates. Considering how often I cut up my hands before Outbreak Day, these gloves screamed solid investment. Solid investment? An odd turn of phrase since all I invested was the time necessary to steal them. Although maybe that was my investment, my time. Time really was, in the end, the only quantitative valuable we all shared, and the only investment that mattered in any sense of the word. The undead had reduced every other form of currency to worthless. After all, who the hell cared about gold when lead was so very much more useful in preserving ones own life. Along those lines I grabbed another pair of gloves for James. It was entirely conceivable that the only thing between undeath and continued life with his family might very well be a pair of Kevlar reinforced leather gloves.
Full finger gloves would’ve been better, but you can't have everything. If I could, then I'd have an Abrams tank with three GAU-17 mini guns manned by blonde Norwegian hotties that just happened to run around topless and magically produced a bottle of my favorite beer whenever I should feel a tad parched. My interior crew would probably have to be adorned in a kind of cotton leotard that encircled, but did not cover the glorious mammary endowments of my crew. A lot of guys would say satin or silk, but cotton breaths better under stressful activity. I'm talking about fighting the tank, you perverted swine. I am a happily married man that would never stray from his marriage bed, not least because my wife would hunt me down and decapitate me with the twelve gauge pump shotgun I bought her.
However, eye candy is entirely permissible.
Although, come to think about it I don't really care for blondes enough to overlook my other options. Everybody and their fucking brothers know I have enjoyed the company of a redhead from time to time, usually to my cost. So maybe my crew of topless beauties should be ginger nymphs with a decided bloodlust. Which would fit with my experience of every redhead I’d e
ver known. In my life. All forty-two years of it.
Okay, daydreams of topless sex kitten redheaded tank crews aside, we still needed to exfiltrate Stuart in the worst possible way. Because more disturbing than the sheriff’s deputies turning on the populace, than the rise of Zombie Green the ebony murder machine, was the growing presence of the Zombie Queen on the edge of my awareness.
No matter what, we did not want to be caught between Zombie Green and the Queen of the Undead. That was a bad scene of an entirely new and completely fucked nature. Waves of psychic overpressure were assaulting my consciousness as the Zombie Queen entered the city. Dealing with just one super zombie was bad enough, but to face down both at once was untenable.
Chapter Eight
In very short order James and I had exited the building, and piled into the truck. This time James was driving and I rocked a magazine into my new rifle. The gloves felt strange, but that was simply their unfamiliarity. Before long I wouldn't even remember I was wearing them. Looking over, James had decided the gloves weren't such a bad idea. He would, of course, have preferred black rather than the coyote tan, but that goes back to not always getting what you wanted. Christ on fire, I wish James wouldn't wear black on black. Reminds me too much of KnightStar mercenaries. If I was being fair about it, James probably thought the same about me always wearing earth tones. Like, always. I rarely ever wore black or red, preferring various shades of brown, green, and tan. What can I say? That's just how I roll. If it weren't for my nowhere near snazzy tactical vest and Kalashnikov pattern rifle, I might just be the poster boy for dime store adventure novels. Provided I ever get my hands on another fucking hat. There were three beautiful wool felt hats safe and sound in my closet at home, but that was entirely too far to go for just a hat. There had been a cigar shop on US1, it was just a little south of our current location. They occasionally stocked Stetson satin lined fedoras. And they stocked my brand of cigars. To me, these were compelling reasons to make the stop. My friend disagreed.
“Are you fucking insane?” James cut straight to the point. Ever the soul of delicacy, he continued,”I'm not risking a run in with Queen of the Undead, or the ebony embodiment of death and dismemberment just so you can look pretty while you ram a big, brown phallic object into your mouth so you can suck on it.”
Someone had obviously been reading his Freud.
“It's because I spit, isn't it? If I swallowed you wouldn't have a problem,” I accused. Now I was certain the tenuous bonds of sanity had lost most, if not all, their grip upon me. “You're biased against spitters. Oh, wait until I tell Melinda. She'll never stand for this. You know that woman abhors prejudice of any kind. She's gonna beat your ass black and blue with a sack full of giant rubber dildos.”
James was so busy staring into the face of bat shit crazy he nearly missed spotting the oncoming car. We swerved just enough to avoid being t-boned by a small Honda hatchback, although the tiny car still slammed into the right front fender with enough force to scratch the paint. The front end of the little import exploded in a shower of plastic, hamster wheel components, and anti-freeze, all of which rained down upon my exposed person because I had been stupid enough to ride along with the window down. Cold fury ignited in my heart as I wiped blisteringly hot anti-freeze from my face and arms. And I meant blisteringly hot because blisters formed on nearly every square inch of exposed flesh struck by the nearly boiling liquid. With an ever mounting desire to set the entire city of Stuart on fire I exited the truck, rifle at a high ready and voiced my trepidations.
“Are you fucking blind? Or just too fucking stupid to be allowed to wipe your own ass?” I bellowed at the shattered windshield. The spider web pattern of broken safety glass obscured my view of the driver, and at least one passenger. Receiving no answer I advanced on the door, spitting vitriol the whole way. “To think, of all the fucking loads of jizz your mother took over what I'm sure was a long career as the town whore, you're what she produced. Christ on fire, anyone of the millions of sperm running the down the inside of her fucking leg could have driven this piece of shit better than you. I’ve left better genetic material in the shower than the pile of pig shit before me now.”
I was so enthralled with my monologue of disparaging remarks I didn't notice the slowing approaching car until the bright setting on the headlights was engaged and a voice sounded over a megaphone.
“Put the weapon down, and back away. You are under arrest for violation of curfew ordinance three-three-one, and for aiding in the escape of…” Whatever else the speaker wanted to say was lost as I dumped an entire magazine into the area behind the bright headlights. Semi-automatic rifles won't fire as quickly as fully automatic, but you can still dump a lot of rounds in a rapid fashion if you don't care about accuracy. Which I didn't because I was now pissed these assholes had interrupted my bitching out of the previous assholes.
When the last spent casing hit the ground I swapped magazines and walked into the blinding light. Past the brilliant illumination I could see the still twitching driver behind the wheel, he had apparently caught several rounds high in the chest. Even money said a round severed an artery, and the bastard just bled out. On the passenger side of the car was a different story. The passenger, a woman in a deputies uniform was pressing a bandage into a hideous stomach wound. Blood ran from the corners of her mouth, and spatter on the uniform, car, and ground told me she wasn't terribly long for this world.
“Must be friends of Dub and Lou,” I said to the deputy. The women’s eye went wide the moment she noticed me, and her hand strayed to the pistol laying next to her. I raised the rifle just enough to assure her that was not a well thought out action. Her wayward hand returned to holding her internal organs within her brutalized form. “Why?”
“What?” Her voice shook from the pain as she spoke.
“No. Not what. Why?” I corrected. “Why? Why do you people think you can run this shit show like it’s your own personal sandbox?”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, I'll give you that one for free,” I said as I walked over to kick the women's sidearm, a goddamn Glock, out of her reach. “Same freebie I gave to Dub, but that dumb mother fucker just kept running back up the stupid tree and falling all the way back down. So you understand, every time I ask you a question and you fail to answer with the most thoroughly detailed and entirely truthful explanations I am going to feed part of you to the undead.”
She blanched at my pronouncement. Pain meant nothing to her because to inflict enough pain on her to matter, given her stomach wound, I would probably end up killing her. That was a given, but being forced to watch as I cut off parts of her and fed them to a zombie reached deep into the dark corners of her mind and filled her being with a dread that could not be described. To emphasize my threat I slid my rifle behind my back and produced my KaBar. Now my blade wasn’t polished like some action star asshole would do, but in the glow of the headlights the deputy could see the razors edge and could imagine it slicing through her fingers, toes, on and on her fear produced images of such carnage she pissed herself.
If you're currently wondering whether I was getting a charge out of this, the answer is hell fucking no I wasn't happy about the entire situation. We were here to get supplies, not get involved with power grabbing assholes, and not to torture information out of wounded people. I didn't want to do this, but if it meant securing our safe extraction from Stuart I'd cut this women into chum and go fishing.
“No,” a voice, young and female screamed from behind me. I turned in time to see a flailing figure barrel into me, tiny, childlike hands slapping at my face while inarticulate invective was hurled at me. I say the figure barreled into me, but only to be kind to the one hundred pound sack of skin and bones I would later learn was named Farah. The reality is she ran headlong into me, but failed in any way, shape, or form to move me more than an inch. Judging from the bright red scratches across her thin, straight nose the impact actually hurt her way more than it did me. I mean the
re wasn't blood gushing from her ears, nose, and eyes, so I basically ignored her. My miniature assailant paused just long enough to touch her own nose, wince in exaggerated pain, and then continue slap fighting with my steel rifle magazines. If I hadn't been in the middle of something I might have let her go on just to see how long it took the tiny terror to slice a finger or palm open. However, I was in the middle of something so I planted my right palm squarely on her face and shoved her away.
From her reaction you'd have thought I landed a heavy right cross to her jaw, because she all but flew backwards onto her ass. I couldn't tell, and didn't care, if she were faking the entire response, I was much stronger than I thought, or if she were just that exhausted. Like I said, I didn't know and didn't care, I was busy. And the focus of my concern had rolled onto her side and was dragging herself inch by blood drenched inch to her polymer wonder pistol. If I weren't entirely convinced she and every swinging dick at the hospital were using their so called authority to force the very people they swore to protect to build them some kind of fortress, I could almost admire the woman's tenacity. Wait, no, fuck it. I'll straight up admit to a qualified admiration.
Admiration or not, I still seized her ankle and drug her back to the starting point. The rough movement did not help with the stomach wound. Hard ass she was, though, the deputy didn't make a sound. Beyond the stifled scream and muffled groans, that is. Damn, I meant to keep that to myself. I was trying hard to portray her in a better light than the sniveling, gut shot sack of meat reality presented me with. I can talk, eh? I could speak so callously about it all because I knew none of it would stick to me. Unless a zombie ate me alive while I was ‘dead’. Or Zombie Green ripped out my spine and ate it before he sucked my brains out through my eyes. Or Madalina slithered up to me and performed whatever feats of slut magic she intended. Looking at it, I would just as soon be just eaten by the zombie since I would technically be dead before dinner began.
